PERFORMANCE

The Polar Vantage M2 is a smartwatch designed for serious athletes. This watch carefully tracks and monitors not only your daily workouts but also your activity habits and even your sleeping patterns to provide customized suggestions to shape you into a happier and healthier human being.

Overall, it takes this watch around 7 days to achieve a full picture of your daily habits before it can provide in-depth suggestions.

What I love most about this watch is that it is a blend of a smartwatch and a fitness tracker. Users can use this watch to track off of their workouts and select from different training programs when at the gym, and then use it as a smartwatch when you are not active.

Users can adjust their music playlists on this phone, and even receive text messages, which is something that many of the higher-end fitness trackers cannot do.

The only downside to the text message notifications on this phone is that it will not send you a push notification if you are in the middle of the workout.

If your spouse sends you a text message alerting you that aliens have invaded the planet, you won’t receive the message until after your wrap up your final set.

CONNECTIVITY

What’s great about this GPS watch is that it does not favor a particular phone brand. It’s compatible with most smartphones that include Apple and Android (as long as you sport a current operating system).

Connecting your watch isn’t essential, but you will miss out on a lot of extra features if you go without them. First and foremost, you won’t be able to receive text messages or tinker with your workout playlist if not connected to your smartphone.

Another reason to connect this watch to your phone is the Polar Workout app. While you have access to all of your workout information right from your watch, it can be a little hard to read on that tiny screen.

By connecting your watch to the Polar App on your smartwatch, you can gain a clear picture with graphs and charts on how your training is progressing.

You can also use this app to plan out your upcoming workouts, and read through workout suggestions and places that you need to improve upon.

It’s important to note that some users struggled a bit connecting their watch to their phone. When getting started, it requires users to dig into the settings in their phone, and it often will not recognize the device the first time around. It takes a little time and patience, but once it’s connected you are good to go!

TRAINING PROGRAMS

When compiling this review, I became a little bit overwhelmed with the massive amount of features offered. It provides users with advanced training features such as FuelWise, Training Load Pro™, FitSpark™, a running index, energy sources, sport profiles, and a host of other tools.

The FuelWise feature is new to the M2, and it is basically a function used primarily in race settings. It calculates how much energy you are outputting, and provides suggestions on how much water and carbs to take in to deplete lost energy levels.

Training Load Pro™ is where the Polar Vantage M2 offers a massive information dump. If you love digging into the minutia of your workouts, this is where the watch really shines.

It complies with all of your workout information and indicates whether you are training too hard, too easy, or you hit that perfect sweet spot. It also indicates areas of the body that have been overworked and strained and parts of the body that have been neglected.

FitSpark™ is one of my favorite features. It works like a tiny personal trainer strapped right to your wrist. Sure, you can look up versatile training programs online, but the FitSpark™ uses past workout data collected from your workouts to compile a workout program just for you. It provides daily workout suggestions, which is perfect if you are in a training rut!

The running index is essential for runners. The VO2 max indicates how much oxygen that you are using as you train. A higher VO2 max means that you can run longer or faster without becoming overly exhausted as more oxygen travels to your muscles.

The running index on this phone automatically calculates your VO2 max to determine if you are moving in the right direction. It also complies this information into a nice graph that makes it easy to track where you excel and points you need to work on.

Sport Profiles provides athletes with up to 130 different training programs to track their progress. It tracks activities such as running, weight training, swimming, cycling, plyometrics, CrossFit, as well as a host of others. Simply select your workout from the list, and get moving!

The Polar Vantage M2 also allows you to customize the information that is detailed on the screen.

BATTERY LIFE

The battery life on this watch is pretty impressive. When used in the active training mode of GPS mode, it has an estimated battery life of around 40 hours.

However, when used in smartwatch mode, the battery will last between 5-7 days. While the user manual suggests only 5 hours, some users were able to squeeze out around 7 days before they needed to pop it on a charger.

With extended battery life, it means that you can wear your watch 24/7, and that includes when you sleep. Many smartwatches require nightly charging, which means that you don’t benefit from sleep trackers.

If you are anything like me, you will also forget to pop your watch back on your wrist before you head out the door.

COMPATIBLE APP

The Polar Flow app is great for tracking your progress and compiling training plans for the upcoming week, but your watch is also compatible with a host of other apps as well.

If you have one of the popular workout apps on your phone, odds are that it is found on Polar’s long list of compatible smartphone apps. It works with popular apps such as MyFitnessPal, Nike+, Strava, Endomondo, and TrainingPeaks.

PRICE

The Polar Vantage M2 isn’t the most affordable training watch out there on the market, but you are certainly getting a big bang for your buck!

This watch pairs well with most smartphones and other fitness apps, and it provides users with tons of tracking features to keep you ahead of the pack. It boasts a sleek design, comes in multiple color options, and works as a tiny personal trainer strapped to your wrist.

Sure, it may cost a bit more than similar options, but the massive amount of features packed into this smartwatch make it an incredible overall value.

Overall, many of the design features of this watch remain unchanged. The biggest improvement made to the style of the watch between versions 1 and 2 is the addition of different color options.

Users can select from more colors than your basic black and include colors such as gold and copper. Aside from new color options, the style of the newer and previous versions are essentially the same.

The latest version on the Polar Vantage M2 is basically a software update that packs in more features. The operating system is the same, so users jumping from version 1 to version 2 won’t run into much trouble learning how the menu systems work. Added training features added to this design include Fuel Wise nutrition reminder and more integrated smartphone features.

Previous versions of this watch connected to your phone but didn’t send you push text notifications or allow users to tinker with their playlists in the middle of the set.

The added smartphone features are a big improvement to this watch and transform it from a fitness tracker to a hybrid smartphone/fitness tracker.

The Vantage M2 also allows users to customize their widgets and remove programs that they don’t use and only serve to clutter up the user menus.

The style and performance are the same between the past and previous versions, but the Vantage M2 added some essential features that make it a notable improvement over previous versions.

If you are on the hunt for a killer fitness tracker that measures the minutia of your daily activities, the Polar Vantage M2 is a great choice. While this design is technically a hybrid fitness tracker and smartwatch, it leans harder into the fitness aspects than the smartwatch features.

It will send your push text notifications, but when it is idle. If you working out, you won’t get your text messages until you are finished with your set.

One of the things that I love most about this fitness tracking watch is that it also offers personalized workout programs on a daily basis. This feature helps users to stay on track, and engage in personalized workouts that are made just for their unique fitness level.

This watch has a sleek style, easy-to-use interface, and tons and tons of workout programs and intuitive tracking that will make you a better and healthier human being!